Furnaces, such as commercial boilers, burn fuels that release gaseous pollutants, such as mercury into the atmosphere. Mercury condenses returns to the ground as a toxic contaminant. New regulations are proposed to greatly reduce the amount of mercury that can be released.
Devices have been employed that reduce the amount of mercury released. One such device disperses activated carbon particles into the flue gasses to adsorb the Mercury gasses.
When too much mercury is exiting the system, the system simply increases the amount of sorbent used. Sometimes other parameters that may be altered to achieve better results.
An activator is used in addition to a sorbent to decrease mercury emissions. Again, there are times when increasing the amount of activator used is not as effective as adjusting another input parameter.
In the past, there have been systems that optimized one or more parameters of the system. These however, did not take into account additional parameters that may be varied to adjust the emissions of mercury from a plant, and did not optimize all the parameters. They also did not optimize with respect to plant operation costs.
With the prior art systems, there may be additional use of sorbent or activator. This results in waste and additional plant operation costs.
Currently there is a need for a system that optimizes the important parameters, insures that gaseous pollutant emissions are below an acceptable set level and that minimized plant operation costs.